Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "I know," Graziano said, "but I kept on thinkin' the sonofa-bitch was gonna say, 'But because of the contributions Graziano has made to boxing.' I figured the bastard was gonna say something like that."

  "And then what?"

  And then it all came out, all of the expletives, all of the vulgarities. The close air in that car was filled with the obscene oaths and the unprintable invectives. He was throwing them wildly, the way he threw punches in the ring where he had found a way to fight back against all the hurts he had invited and that society had inflicted upon him. Now, cornered and wounded again, he was seeing society as his enemy again, personified by Eagan.

  "I'll kill the bastard," he was saying. "I'll get a gun. I'll kill the sonofabitch. The sonofabitch should be dead. I'll . . ."

  "For Christ sake, Rock!" Healy was saying, and he had slowed the car and he had turned toward him.

  "Please, Rocky!" Irving Cohen was saying. "Don't even talk like that!"

  "I'll kill him," he was saying.

  "Come on now, Rocky," I was saying, and I was leaning forward and I had my hands on his shoulders as he sat there between Healy and Irving. "For God's sake, stop that. You listen to me."

  "You listen to Bill, Rocky," Irving was saying. "You listen to Bill. Bill knows."

  What did I know? I told him it wasn't the end of his world. I told him that he could fight Zale again, maybe in New Jersey or maybe in Illinois, and that this time he would lick him. When he did, he would be the middleweight champion of the world, and public opinion would turn then on Eagan, and then he would get his license back.

  We were at Union Square by now, and Healy turned the car around and drove south again and they dropped me off at my paper on lower Broadway. On the way we kept saying the same things to him over and over again, and when I wrote my piece, of course I left all of that out. They were just words, but some of those he had known had gone to the electric chair and others he had run with were in Sing Sing doing twenty to life, and his whole future was balanced on that pinnacle of public opinion. If I wrote that, there was no way he would ever get his license back, and so I wrote what I could about his hurt and that he would take his wife and Audrey, their small daughter, to Florida while Irving Cohen tried to plan something out.

  So the second Zale fight was made for Chicago, and I saw the fighter in training in the East and then out there. Nothing was ever said about the ride from Cooper Square to Union Square and then downtown again, but now, five months later, I was following Whitey and him out into the hallway and up the stairs to the next floor.

  They had two rooms there, with the door open between them. In one there were two beds, one for the fighter and the other for Whitey. In the other there were three cots for the sparring partners and Frank Percoco, who would work in the fighter's corner with Irving and Whitey.

  "You better try these trunks on," Whitey said.

  The fighter undressed. He had been training for two months and he was in great shape, and Whitey handed him the trunks, black with red stripes, first one pair and then the other, and he tried them on, squatting down and then standing up.

  "The first ones are too tight," he said, handing the second pair back to Whitey. "These are best."

  He got, naked, into one of the beds then, and he pulled the covers up to his chest. He had put two pillows together under his head, so he was half sitting up, and Whitey looked at me and I looked at him, and he walked into the other room.

  "So, I'll go now, Rock," I said.

  "Okay," he said.

  "You have to lick this guy, Rock," I said, and I was standing by the bed, looking down at him. "If you ever had to win a fight, you have to win this one."

  "I know," he said, nodding.

  "I despise them for what they did to you," I said, "and you hate them, and there's only one way you can get even. If you lose tomorrow night, you're done, not only in New York but everywhere. You have to win, Rock."

  "I know," he said.

  "You have to stick to it," I said. "You have to win the title, because when you win the title it's yours, and they can't take it away from you outside the ring. You win it and they need it, and as I told you in the car that night, they'll come crawling back, begging you on their hands and knees."

  "I know," he said, lying there in that bed and looking up right at me. "If I have to, I'll die in there, tryin'."

  We shook hands and he snapped off the light over the bed and I left. I took an elevator down and went out and called a cab, and riding back to my hotel and thinking about it I was embarrassed. They come no more decent than Tony Zale and no tougher than he was inside the ropes, and what was I doing telling someone he would have to take those brutal shots in the belly and to the head while I would just sit there at ringside, looking up into the brutality?

  They drew $422,918 for an indoor record and they had them packed to the walls again and up to the rafters. Suddenly, the hot, humid, sweat-smelling air was stilled of sound and then Al Melgard at the Stadium organ started "The Sidewalks of New York," and a roar went up in the back and down the aisle he came. He had the white satin, green-trimmed robe over his shoulders, and Whitey and Irving and Frank Percoco were behind him. The roar, and then the booing, was all over the place now, and Whitey was rubbing his back as they came. Then, two steps from the stairs, he broke from Whitey and took the three steps in one leap and vaulted through the ropes, throwing his arms out into the roar and the boos so the robe slid off.

  "Yes," I said to myself, "he'll stick it all right."

  He stuck it, and there were times when it looked as if he would have to die doing it. Under his right eye the flesh had swelled so that it shut the eye, and when Zale cut the left eye, the blood flowed into it so that he was stumbling around almost blind and seeing only through a red haze. Snarling, he motioned Zale to come in, and Zale threw all of his big stuff at him and he took it all. There were times in the third round when I said to myself that if this were just a fight, and not bigger than a fight, he would go down. I said to myself that he couldn't win it, and then an odd thing happened.

  Between the fourth and fifth rounds, Frank Percoco took a quarter—two bits—and pressing with it between his fingers, he broke the skin of the swelling under the right eye. When the blood came out the swelling came down enough for the fighter to see. In the sixth round, with Zale helpless on the ropes, Graziano, in that frenzy that made him what only he and Dempsey and, I guess, Ketchel, were, was hitting him wherever he could find a place to hit him, and the referee stopped it.

  "Well," I said to him, "the world is a big place, and how does it feel to be the middleweight champion of it?"

  In that basement of the Chicago Stadium he was standing, naked once more, in the shower stall off the dressing room, his right eye shut again, a metal clip holding the other cut closed. Only a fireman in uniform was with us, guarding the door that Whitey had opened just long enough for me to get in.

  "I don't know," he said. He had closed down the flow of the shower so that it barely dripped on him. Cut and bruised and hurt, and leaning back and resting one arm on the shower handles, he was trying to think and to talk. "I don't know. I mean ... I mean as a kid ... I mean I was no good. I mean nobody ever . . . you know what I mean?"

  "I know what you mean, Rocky," the fireman said suddenly. "You're giving a talk on democracy."

  "I mean, I never. . . ," the fighter said to me, and then he turned to the fireman and, sort of studying him, he said, "You're a good guy. You're all right. You know what I mean?"

  The next day it started in the Chicago papers, as I had told him it would, and it was the same in the New York papers when I got back two days later. Nothing had changed, really, neither the fighter nor the charges against him by those who had called him a liar and a hoodlum, but now those who had been crying out against him where crying out for him as a citizen wronged.

  "Well," Wilbur Wood said, a smile on his face and sticking out his hand, when I walked into the office, "we had it all the way."
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  "All the way?" I said, shaking hands. "What did we have all the way?"

  "Graziano," he said, still smiling. "Haven't you seen the other papers?"

  "Yes," I said. "I've seen them."

  "We had him all the way," Wilbur said. "All the way."

  "Good, Wilbur," I said. "I'm real glad."

  My gladness was to be short-lived. Just when, it seemed, the pressure of that public opinion and the promise of a big gate for this third fight with Zale would force New York State to restore his license, someone got it out of the War Department that he had gone AWOL from the Army in 1943, had spent nine months in Leavenworth, and had a dishonorable discharge. In this game these misguided patriots were playing with the life of a hounded and tortured human being who had served his time and was trying to make an honest living, he was now back at Square One.

  "How did you mess up like that?" I asked him.

  "This captain," he said, "he come out from behind his desk. He said, 'You think you're so tough?' He started to take his coat off, like this. What was I supposed to do? I belted him—pow!—and flattened him, and I took off."

  And I had mislead him. Bending over that bed in that hotel room in Chicago that night, I had told him that once he won the title, they could never take it from him outside the ring but, of course, they did. Because Abe J. Greene, the head of the National Boxing Association, refused to be cowed by them and stood up for him, they let him defend that title against Zale in the ball park in Newark, New Jersey, and they paid him for it, but he was no fighter then. The things they had done to him had taken out of him that which had made him the fighter he had been, and Zale knocked him out in the third round.

  Trying to bring him back, Irving Cohen signed him for a fight in Oakland, California, with Fred Apostoli who, nine years before, had been middleweight champion. Ten days before the scheduled date, riding the train into town, I was checking the sports pages in the morning papers, when I saw the story out of Oakland. Rocky Graziano had disappeared, and Jimmy Murray, the promoter, was threatening to sue him and Irving Cohen. At the paper I tried to write whatever piece I had in mind, but I gave up and called Irving Cohen at his office.

  "Where's the fighter?" I said.

  "We don't know," he said.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  "Listen, Irving," I said. "You've got to do something. You know his whole future depends on this. You've got to square this, and you've got to do something right now."

  "But I don't know what to do," he said.

  "Stay right where you are," I said. "I'll be up there in a half hour."

  He had a small office in the Brill Building on Broadway. When I got there it was noon, and I found him with Teddy Brenner, who was making matches for a small club then and later headed boxing at Madison Square Garden.

  "Have you found him?" I said to Irving.

  "No," he said. "We don't know where he is. We don't know what to do."

  "I'll tell you what to do," I said. "Call Terry Young and Lulu and Bozo Costantino and Al Pennino and anybody else you can think of from the old neighborhood. Tell them to form a posse and go out and find him, because he'll be hiding out somewhere in one of his old haunts. Tell them to have him call you, or come up here."

  The four I had named were lightweight fighters of the time. Terry Young had brought Graziano, while he was running from the Army, to Irving, and we waited while Irving made some phone calls.

  "They'll look for him," Irving said when he came off the phone, "but I don't know."

  "Now call the Capitol Hotel," I said, "and reserve a suite for five o'clock. Then tell the Garden to call the news services and all the papers, and tell them that Rocky Graziano will hold a press conference at the Capitol at six o'clock."

  "But what if we don't find him?" Irving said.

  "Please, Irving," I said, "don't worry about that now. We've got almost six hours, and if he doesn't show, you will."

  I went out and had a sandwich, and then I walked over to the boxing office at the Garden to be sure they had made the calls to the sports desks of papers and the news services. It was about three o'clock when I got back to Irving Cohen's office, and we sat around there for another hour, waiting for the phone to ring.

  "What do we do now?" Irving said.

  "Well, we sit and hope," I said. "We've still got two hours, but if he doesn't show, you will. You'll go over to the Capitol, and you'll speak for him. You know, as well or better than I, that he's not equipped to fight now, and you'll tell them that. You'll say that if he had hurt his hand or had some other injury, a physical examination would reveal that, and the fight would be postponed. The hurt that has been done him outside the ring, however, doesn't show up in an exam, but it has left him so emotionally and mentally disturbed that he is now as ill-equipped to fight as if he had a physical ailment. You'll say it wouldn't be fair to those who'd pay the money to see him fight Apostoli or anyone else right now. You'll say that, and you'll say you'll make whatever amends you have to make to Jimmy Murray for whatever expenses he's had setting up and promoting the fight."

  "That's right," Irving said. "We will."

  "Good," I said.

  "But I don't think I can say all that," Irving said.

  "Of course you can," I said.

  "No," Irving said, shaking his head. "That's the truth. He's in no condition to fight, but I'll never be able to say it, to explain it like that. I won't get it right."

  "All right," I said. "I'll write it out for you."

  I sat down at a typewriter there, and I wrote five or six paragraphs and I handed the two pages to him. He read them and folded them and put them in his pocket, and at about five o'clock the phone rang, and Irving picked it up.

  "Good!" I heard him say. "Where is he? Good. Now listen. Tell him to be at the Capitol Hotel by six o'clock. We have a suite there in my name. Tell him it's a press conference. Tell him to be sure to be there at six o'clock. You have that? At the Capitol Hotel, across from the Garden, at six o'clock. Good."

  He put the phone back on the cradle and he looked up, smiling.

  "They found him," he said. "They're going to tell him to be sure to be there. Now I just hope he shows up."

  Yes, I was thinking, and he may not. With all he has gone through, and all he has taken, he may just decide that it is hopeless, and go over the hill again.

  At 5:30 Irving Cohen left for the Capitol, and just before six o'clock Teddy Brenner and I followed. The suite was at the end of a floor, and they were all there waiting. At 6:30, we were still waiting.

  "Come on now, Irving," one of them said, finally. "What's going on? Where the hell is he?"

  "He's on his way, I'm sure," Irving said. "I'm sorry to hold you up, but I'm sure he'll be here."

  "But when?" somebody else said. "You call us all in here and there's no fighter. We've got deadlines to meet, and we can't sit around here all night. What are we supposed to do now?"

  "Well," Irving said, "I've got a statement here, if you'd like me to read it."

  "Hell, yes," somebody else said. "Read it. At least give us something."

  He took the pages out of his pocket and unfolded them and started to read. Jack Hand of the Associated Press and I were half sitting together on a radiator cover, like all the others taking notes, and he knew how close I was to the fighter and he nudged me.

  "Did you write this?" he said.

  "Hell no," I said, going on with my note-taking. "I'm a stranger to it too."

  "It sure sounds like you," he said.

  When Irving finished they started the questions. We were clustered around Irving and the door to the hall was still open, and then I heard someone say it.

  "Here he comes now."

  He came through the door and into the suite. He had on a beautiful camel's hair polo coat, but there was a growth of several days beard on his face and under the coat he wore an old woolen shirt and dirty slacks and there were heavy road work shoes on his fe
et.

  "I'm with my friends," he said.

  Only some of them were his friends, but he had stopped just inside the door, and now he held both hands out. You could hear every breath in the room.

  "What happened, Rocky?" one of them said. "What's the matter?"

  "It's like I got a scar on my face," he said, staring through them and bringing his right hand up to his right cheek. "Why don't they leave me alone, or put me in jail?"

  He always spoke from where he lived, and that did it. It did it in the papers the next day. Collier's picked it up from the papers and ran two autobiographical pieces, and the following September, his New York State license was restored. He fought Charley Fusari in the Polo Grounds and stopped him in the tenth round while I, doing a magazine piece about what it is like to be a fighter's wife, walked the streets of Brooklyn with Norma, her mother, and a friend of theirs. On the nights he fought, she could not bear to stay in the house.

  They live now in a yellow-brick high-rise apartment house on the southeast corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Second Avenue in what, with the construction that went up there right after World War II, became one of the more fashionable sections of the city. Under the canopy a slim, rather tall woman of late middle years, precise and imperious in a light tan and brown pants suit and wearing a wide-brimmed, buff take-off—maybe by Don Kline or Adolpho—of a man's fedora, was standing. At her feet were three pieces of matched tan luggage, and the uniformed doorman was walking the street toward the corner, blowing his whistle and waving his right arm and trying to flag down a cab.